BuzzMaven Blog

I’m truly hopeful that this gentleman finds someone to help him with what looks to be a very ambitious web project. But what I wanted to point out is how they are probably excluding the cream of the crop by their contact technique: using blind carbon copy and a mass-email to god-knows-how-many web firms. This…

I would say absolutely NOT. I’ve never, ever seen a good one. Recent MEC tests show founder video on a subscription product actually can hurt conversions! They found that the person sometimes couldn’t see or hear the video for technical reasons, and that this would hurt the chances of conversion. Now, we didn’t see what…

I’ve been impressed with the improvements lately in digital billboards. They’re very bright and are begining to rival their rolled-on competitors in daylight. Of course at night they have no rival. Lamar has a video out showing off their technology, and it’s pretty impressive. The Outdoor Advertising Association of America estimates there are 500 digital…

In high school, I had one of the cooler jobs. I did darkroom and printing work at Silkworm Screenprinting in Murphysboro, IL. I worked with some rabid entrepreneurs including artist/entrepreneur Bob Cambers and photographer/entrepreneur Craig Williams. Bob now runs Silkworm, and Craig runs CommunityLink Publications creating various branding materials that promote local communities. These were…

You don’t need an invitation to get a gmail account now in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Egypt . If you Google “RIP Gmail” you’ll see my previous post about how incoming spam killed my Gmail Account. And now, with unchecked outbound spam, Gmail is about to become the next hotmail. Seth Godin’s point about…

Starting in around 2002, I began suggesting to Kentucky companies that they find a blogger to serve as their voice in the blogosphere. I also wrote about it, twice, as have every major business journal available, but it seems few around me have given it much effort. A couple of my clients wanted to send…

If you want to check out how well your anger-management therapy is working, sign up for Microsoft’s bCentral listbuilder program. And then try to get support for it. I have tens of thousands of subscribers on the system and it’s going to be huge pain to move but they’re not getting another dime from me.…

bluppet [bluhp-it] -noun 1. a person, goup, government, etc. whose blog, wiki, forum or website whose postings are encourage, prompted or controlled by a commercial or political interest without making said sponsorship immediately clear. Use: “Wal-Mart hired a bluppet for their Public Relations campaign.” “I unsubscribed from his blog, he’s just a Bluppet for that…

Allume System gets It – When you want off of an email list, you just want the he** off. Allume makes great software but I’m getting too much email. So I decided to unsubscribe from their announcements. To my delight, they didn’t require me to do much. They just gave me a button. Click. I’m…

Are you tired of all of those little blue flashing lights on headsets hanging on the ears of everyone you try to talk with? Are you tired of wondering if they are suffering from schizophrenia or on the phone? No more mucking about. When I’m on the phone in my car or in a meeting,…

As you can see (blogroll below) I’ve added a rare entry to the Sweet Spot blogroll for the new Yahoo Search Marketing blog. Steve Mitgang – Senior VP at Yahoo is apparantly going to steer the gig. Steve is a frequent speaker and drives Yahoo’s advertising products, and has been involved in many top brands…

Adwords and other Pay per click ads make a promise that the landing page needs to keep. We all see the ads for spammy sites on a regular basis. We know how to skip them. Google’s system just raises their minimum bids until they go away. Others have found many more examples. But the type…

I have been looking at the Omakase links that Amazon Associates (Affiliate) program is putting on the left side of my blog entries (upd: have removed) and trying to figure out how they’ve decided what books to put on. Some of them are no-brainers. Others are a bit more clever… Here’s a snapshot of a…

You can add keywords to your pay per click campaign in bulk instead of one at a time. It’s easier to tweak keyword base bids and customer targeting options and to watch historical performance of a given keyword. Dynamic text has supposedly been improved, though I’ve not tried out any new pay per click ads…

Another example of “Flash gone amuk” — Too much time spent making too many perty flash animations without thinking very hard about how your site will appear in the search engine results pages. Someday perhaps Paul Frank will call me and I can give them a few pointers – they are a very cool company.…

There are several consumer concepts that drive the success of every SEM activity I do. 1) Perceived Value. 2) Perceived Ease of Use. 3) Perceived Future Peril When a visitor searches for an item, and they see a search result or a sponsored link, they run through these concepts in a fraction of a second.…

In the Wednesday August 30 edition of the Lexington Herald Leader, owned by McClatchy Newspapers, full page ads meant for families of Comair Flight 5191 were placed by attorneys. Without question, it was the most offensive single marketing piece I’ve ever seen in my career. The Kentucky Bar Association named a special task force to…

Every week I see it, an individual and a company facing off – or one business toe-to-toe with another – over domain names. And it always happens when one or another of them are faced with pressures of site deadlines, launch dates, or other critical in-house problems. The pressures makes everyone grumpy, and what otherwise…

If you’ve bought an airline ticket in the past few years, you’ll find using this site a simple matter. RedRoller.com offers comparison shipping options for small business who aren’t married to one particular vendor. It’s slick – and may save folks thousands. Smart people and another great idea. Small Business Shipping with RedRoller Links and…

I’m confused about why it is that Apple doesn’t release a version of iTunes with a built-in RSS feed generator and validator? (see below for a creaky one.) I’m fairly XML savvy and I still miss syntax issues sometimes – even using feedforall or other tools. It would seem that Apple could make the iTunes…

I have now been using Writely for 6 months and still love it. Google Spreadsheets have become a core tool of my business for communicating tabular data to my clients. These “lightweight” apps are better than I ever expected. I am updating my Writely – A Web Word Processor document as things progress. It looks…

Another winner from Network Solutions. In the Address above, 53rd Street has a space at the end. Good Lord. That’s worse than “the number you are dialing doesn’t require a 1 and area code….” Let the computer do the work, not me!

Are you making bad assumptions about products? traffic? conversion? These questions, asked early and pursued relentlessly, could save many website projects. Unfortunately, many projects don’t slow down enough to ask these questions – and so the project stalls after much energy and time has been invested. The concept of testing (split testing to be exact)…

Ecommerce/Ebay Customers and Shippers like: Fast Cheap Reliable Saturday Delivery Anywhere-in-the-country So, USPS and DHL have a program called [email protected] that banks on both carriers’ strengths to provide shippers a faster, less expensive method for sending packages. But there’s a catch…. you had to ship a lot of packages to get involved – 200-500 a…